What's with the old trolls?

Given recent events, and from what I understand a bit of publicity for our happy little site, I expect to experience an upswing in new accounts by
people here to troll around, then they lose interest or get banned, and within a few weeks it dies down and all is right in the world.

Over the past few days I've noticed the expected additional trolls (note the ignore button would useful if we had it) however the vast majority seem
to be older members (at least a year) that for some reason, unknown to me, have decided to lower their personal standards and resort to behavior
unbecoming of someone with their ranking.

Its amazing to me how trolls like you are talking about last so long on this forum.
The moderators here are second to none, and for the most part act impartially and quickly.
But with that being said, I see what you are talking about alot.

I refer to them as drive by trolls, they hit the thread, take one or two shots at the OP without even reading the rest of the thread, and then
disappear and drive by another thread. The kind that annoy me the most are the ones who show up 6 pages into a thread, make the same point that has
already been discussed ad nauseum and seemingly put to bed, only to open up 6 more pages of the same.

Hopefully it will settle down sooner or later. In any event, you do have a point. One of the principals of ATS has always kind of been for the older
members to strive to show the "best of the board" and in some cases that seems to be getting forgotten at times.

Like me? I put this right where it belonged, although I must admit I didn't look through bts for this topic, it's bts, full of randomness.

P.S. I didn't slam the mods, I have seen them working, at it seems they are working overtime at the moment. Nearly every thread I click on (granted
this is specific my interest areas, I haven't clicked every thread) seems to have a ton of mod edits, deletions, warnings, etc. Again indicating that
people are not behaving.

Originally posted by searching4truth
Over the past few days I've noticed the expected additional trolls (note the ignore button would useful if we had it) however the vast majority seem
to be older members (at least a year) that for some reason, unknown to me, have decided to lower their personal standards and resort to behavior
unbecoming of someone with their ranking.

Someone with their ranking?! ATS isn't the court of Queen Elizabeth the first. Our beloved skeptic overlord doesn't give out knighthoods (although
Sir Silver Star does have a certain ring to it).

I know what you mean though. I think after you've become a familiar face around here, you're cut a bit of slack when it comes to toleration of your
thread disrupting hi-jinks. I say that with no heat... it's a fact of life that the powers-that-be give their pals special treatment.

P.S. yes I have reported a few of the exceptional ones.

edit on 11-1-2011 by searching4truth because: (no reason given)

Why bother? In fact, I'm often puzzled as to why anyone would bother to report anything. The thought has never crossed my mind to 'alert' a thread
or post. Who gives a fig?

What I meant is people that have not only been around a long amount of time, but participate very frequently

Perhaps, it is a benefit of making the right friends or whatever, but I have seen a large amount of mod notes and such, like I said they seem to be
working overtime, it's simply a very large job right now.

I've never reported anyone in my two or so years here, but recently it's just become outright ridiculous and I finally had enough.

In other words theres' peoples here who try to do other things and nobuddy even notices while the whole time others is NOT doing the same thing and
everybuddy says something like "Hey, look at what HE'S doing".

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